5 ways to create charts in Notion

🎉 New You can import your Notion databases directly to Rows using the new Notion integration so that you can add beautiful charts to your Notion reports, seamlessly connected to a Notion database.

Notion is a project management suite for individuals and teams. It’s the preferred tool for thousands of individuals and businesses to manage their day-to-day work. Depending on the goal, Notion can be a company wiki, a CRM for Sales, a study planner or anything in between. 

As more teams understand the importance of data and flock to Notion, we’ve seen in countless forum posts, subreddits and Discord communities questions about how to add charts to Notion. This article answers those questions. We'll show you about 5 tools and how to use them to add beautiful, interactive charts to Notion. Let’s dive in.

1. Rows

Rows is a web application for creating modern, beautiful and functional spreadsheets. It combines a modern spreadsheet editor, data integrations (e.g. Social media, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Stripe) and a novel sharing experience that turns any spreadsheet into a website in one-click. 

Follow the steps below to create an interactive chart in Notion using Rows:

1. If you haven't signed up for Rows, do that here and login to your account.

2. Create a spreadsheet. Do this by clicking on the “Create Spreadsheet” button.

3. Fill in the table with the data that will be used to create the chart. You can add your data manually, import a file or import connect directly to a Notion database using the Rows Notion integration.

4. Once your data is ready, highlight all the data you want to use and click the Insert button on the top of the page. From the dropdown options, select Chart.

5. Once a Chart is generated, you can customize it using the Chart sidebar. This is where you can pick between chart types, add names to the axis, pick the chart series, among others.

6. The last prerequisite for getting your embed link is to turn on “Share privately with the link” on the spreadsheet. Do this by clicking on the Share button on the toolbar on the top right corner, next to the Live button.

Enable Share privately with the link before embedding

7. Click on the chart you want to add to Notion, and click on the “..” options menu on the top right corner of the chart. Click on the three dots and from the dropdown and select Embed. From the popup, select Copy URL to copy the link for Notion embed.

8. Finally, go into your Notion document. Simply paste the Notion embed link copied and choose the Create embed option. Adjust the size of your Notion chart to your taste.

Embed charts in Notion in one click

Now that the chart is embedded in Notion, it has a live connection to the underlying data source. If the table with the data is updated on Rows, so is the chart. 

There are plenty of other ways to use Rows to make your Notion documents stand out. Learn more about it here or see our pre-built Notion templates for a Paid Marketing Report, a Website Traffic Overview Report, a Growth Experiments Report, and for your Weekly Team Sync Notes.

2. Notioncharts

Notioncharts is the second tool that can be used to create embeddable charts from your Notion databases. Unlike Rows, which is a full-fledged spreadsheet that you can use everyday, Notioncharts was built exclusively to create charts to embed in Notion. 

There are about nine different Notion charts and graphs that can be created using these steps:

1. First, connect your Notion Account to your NotionCharts account and select the pages you want to share between both applications.

2. Next, upload your data in your Notion Database.

3. On your Notioncharts dashboard, select the table containing your data. Then select the X and Y axis, if you want to group the data, and how you want to sort the data in the chart.

4. This will generate a chart that you can customize, choosing from nine different chart types.

5. Finally, click ‘Copy Embed Url’ on the top of the chart to get your embed link that can be placed in any Notion report.

The NotionCharts dashboard to create a chart

Note: The chart does not refresh automatically in case you add or update the database. To update the chart click on “Refresh Chart Data” on the top left corner of the embedded chart.

3. NoChart

Just like the Notioncharts, NoChart is another solution that uses your existing Notion databases as the source to create the chart. Here’s how to add a NoChart to Notion:

1. After signin up, click the ‘Create your first draft’ button on your dashboard.

2. On the next page, click the ‘Connect to Notion’ button at the top left corner of that page.

3. A permissions popup will be opened on a new page. There, you have to select a Notion page and give NoChart access to the tables on that page.

4. A settings section will be rendered on the left side of the page where you can customize the elements of your chart. This includes the Chart type (Line, Bar, Pie, KPI), basic color formatting, and filters to only show chart values based on certain conditions

5. A chart will be created on the right side of the page and more customization can be done to get the chart to meet your taste.

6. Finally, click the “Save” button. Copy the resulting url, paste it to Notion and click to “Create embed”.

NoChart interface to create chart

4. NotionVIP

NotionVIP is a website that showcases tips, templates, videos and dozens of other resources on Notion. It also boasts its own chart building tool. But unlike the previously discussed tools, creating your Notion chart on Notion VIP can be done right from their homepage and does not require any additional setup.

1. Take a look at their demo data and in google spreadsheets, create your data in the same structure.

2. Once your data is ready, copy the share url. On their homepage, scroll down to the ‘Connect your Google Sheet’ section and paste the copied url into the first input field.

3. Give your sheet a name and select the range that your data falls within on your sheet

4. You can also customize your chart by selecting the type, theme, colors and formatting the axes.

5. Next, click the ‘Make magic’ button to render the chart embed url.

6. Finally, click the ‘Copy your Url’ button and paste anywhere in your Notion sheet to render your chart.

Use the NotionVIP builder to generate the chart

Note: The chart does not refresh automatically in case you add or update the database. To update the chart click on the refresh icon on the top left corner of the embedded chart.

5. Data Jumbo

Similar to Notion charts, creating charts in Data Jumbo requires that you first connect the two accounts. To ensure that you can access your Notion database on your Data Jumbo dashboard.

1. On your dashboard, click the ‘Create A New Chart’ button at the top right corner.

2. In the popup, select a Notion database for your chart and then the ‘Build my chart’ button to confirm.

3. The data from the selected database is made available in a sidebar at the left side of the page. Pick the data to be visualized

4. A chart will be generated and you can customize the type, color and values

5. When done, click the ‘Add to Notion’ button at the top right corner of the page

6. From the popup, click the copy icon by the embed url and paste anywhere within your Notion document.

The Data Jumbo interface to create the chart

Note: The chart does not refresh automatically in case you add or update the database. To update the chart click on refresh icon on the top left corner of the embedded chart.

Conclusion

It’s impressive to see Notion evolve from being a niche product for individuals to the de facto wiki of fast-moving companies. As people collaborate within it and it becomes the central hub for a team’s documentation, it becomes essential to bring data visualization to the mix. 

Rows is the simplest, most flexible way to add charts in Notion. It’s the spreadsheet of choice for modern teams that believe high-quality documentation is key to success. It has many customizable chart options, its chart data refreshes in real-time and it can be used for more than charts (e.g. embed large tables of data, embed calculators).

Sign up on Rows today to enjoy all these features and many more. If there are any tools we left out, share with us on Twitter.